Conditionally Human
A Positronic Book
Published on 3. April 2018
Book
Hardback
42 pages
978-1-5154-2099-6 (ISBN)
Description
In Conditionally Human, Walter M. Miller, Jr. turns a future of genetic engineering, population control, and manufactured companions into a searching question about what makes a life human. The story is set in a society where engineered humanoid beings can be designed to satisfy emotional needs that ordinary social law and biological limits have left unmet. These creations are useful, affectionate, dependent, and officially less than human-but Miller's fiction presses hard on that official distinction, asking whether personhood can be withheld by decree once love, suffering, loyalty, and moral responsibility enter the room.
First published in the early 1950s and later collected in Miller's 1962 volume Conditionally Human, the title story belongs to the thoughtful, ethically charged strain of postwar science fiction that made Miller one of the field's most serious writers. Project Gutenberg describes the novella as a story about synthetic humanoid creatures known as neutroids, created in a future shaped by population control and genetic engineering, and centred on the moral dilemmas surrounding creation, affection, and the value placed on life. For readers of classic science fiction, bioethical SF, social science fiction, dystopian futures, artificial life stories, and the author of A Canticle for Leibowitz, Conditionally Human is a compact but powerful work about the terrible ease with which societies define some beings as disposable. Explore other exciting Positronic Books devoted to classic science fiction, fantasy, and mystery.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
227 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5154-2099-6 (9781515420996)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1923-1996) was an American science fiction writer best known for A Canticle for Leibowitz, one of the defining post-apocalyptic novels of the twentieth century. Before that novel secured his reputation, Miller was a prolific and highly regarded writer of short fiction in the 1950s magazine market, publishing in venues such as Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia notes that Conditionally Human appeared in Miller's 1962 collection of the same name, one of the major collections of his shorter work.Miller served in World War II as a bomber crewman, an experience that deeply shaped his later fiction, especially his concern with guilt, responsibility, technological power, and civilization's capacity for self-destruction. His work often carries unusual moral pressure for magazine-era science fiction: questions of faith, war, memory, conscience, personhood, and survival are not decorative themes but central conflicts. In Conditionally Human, Miller brings that seriousness to artificial life and social control, making the story valuable for readers interested in classic science fiction, ethical speculation, bioengineering, dystopian futures, and the troubled boundary between human convenience and human responsibility.